1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical element manufacturing method and an optical element manufacturing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
A technique of molding an optical element in a desired shape by heating and pressing a thermo-reversible optical material such as glass or the like within a molding die is known. This technique sometimes needs a lot of time to uniformly heat glass or the like due to a low thermal conductivity of the glass or the like if the glass or the like is attempted to be heated with heat conducted from a portion that makes contact with the molding die.
Therefore, Patent Document 1 discloses a technique of uniformly heating glass within a molding die by directly spraying a heated inactive gas onto the glass as auxiliary heating means.